Newport Beach Playwright Gets Top Prize From SCR

A television writer with six full-length plays in her drawer, none of them produced, has taken top honors in South Coast Repertory’s sixth annual California Playwrights Competition.

Cecilia Fannon, 43, who lives in Newport Beach, won the $5,000 top prize for “Green Icebergs,” a comic drama about modern sexual manners set in Italy and involving a pair of American couples who meet by accident on vacation.

This is the second year in a row that Fannon has been awarded a prize in SCR’s statewide contest. In 1993, the native New Yorker took the $3,000 second prize for “To Distraction,” a dark comedy about a woman having a bad life.

“It feels unbelievable, truly unbelievable,” Fannon said by phone from Hawaii, where she was traveling with her husband, Jonathan Bliss, also a writer.

This year’s second prize went to David Ford, a director and performance artist who lives in Oakland, for “Too Good to Be True.” His drama revolves around a national AIDS charity whose employees are forced to examine their motives when the organization undergoes changes in leadership.

SCR uses the competition to encourage playwrights and to find unproduced scripts for possible production. Both winning plays will be given NewSCRipt readings this season: “Too Good to Be True” on March 14 and “Green Icebergs” on May 2.

For the first time, the theater also gave cash awards of $1,000 each to three honorable mentions: Allison Gregory of Los Angeles for “Forcing Hyacinths”; Kate Hawley of Santa Cruz for “Simply the Thing She Is,” and Glen Merzer of Santa Monica for “Bad Press.”

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SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch, one of the competition judges, described Fannon as “a writer who makes extraordinary things happen out of apparently ordinary circumstances.” He said “Green Icebergs” reminded him of Noel Coward.

“It’s not British, and it’s not arch, and it doesn’t sound like Coward,” he said. “But it makes me think of him in terms of spirit. Fannon’s strategy is similar to his. They create a world that is comedic but also committed to presenting a view of existence from which you are to infer serious things about the nature of living.”

Fannon writes for “Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego,” an educational children’s cartoon that airs Saturday mornings on the Fox network. During the mid-’80s she was a head writer for the CBS daytime soap “The Guiding Light.”

But she has been writing plays for years. Two others--”Wowee Maui” and “Learning to Float”--were submitted to the SCR competition in 1990 and 1991; both finished out of the money but made a short list of finalists.

“Plays roll around in my head like marbles,” she said. “When they’re ready to come out, they just spill out. But it’s not as if I haven’t thought about them. They roll around for a long time in there.”

They also seem to roll around the country without landing at any particular destination. “To Distraction,” for example, won a prize in 1992 from L.A. Theatre Works, which gave it a radio production directed by JoBeth Williams. But a promised broadcast on KCRW, supposed to be part of the prize, somehow never materialized. And while a handful of theaters also showed interest in the play--including Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Denver Center Theatre and San Jose Repertory--no productions resulted.

But Fannon’s unproduced status could change with “Green Icebergs.”

Said Patch: “We’re very bullish on it.”

A total of 275 scripts were submitted to the competition this year, roughly the same number as last year, theater officials noted. The prize money was donated by the American Express Co.

PLAYWRIGHTS COMPETITION

The South Coast Repertory contest’s previous winners:

* 1992: “Mrs. Zelinski Comes to Call” by Nancy Crawford (first prize, $5,000), not produced; “To Distraction” by Cecilia Fannon (second prize, $3,000), not produced.

* 1991: “Capoeira” by Tanya Myren-Zobel (first prize, $5,000), not produced; “Caribbean Romance” by William C. Sterritt (second prize, $3,000), not produced.

* 1990: “Custer’s Last Band” by Abe Polsky (first prize, $5,000), not produced; “Noah Johnson Had a Whore” by Jon Bastian (second prize, $3,000), produced on the Second Stage in 1992.

* 1989: “Pirates” by Mark Lee (first prize, $5,000), produced on the Mainstage in 1991. Two plays tied for second place: “The Ramp” by Shem Bitterman ($2,500), produced on the Second Stage in 1990, and “An Office Romance” by Robert Daseler ($2,500), produced as “Alekhine’s Defense” on the Second Stage in 1990.

* 1988: “The Geography of Luck” by Marlane Meyer (first prize, $5,000), produced on the Second Stage in 1989; “Dragon Lady” by Robert Daseler (second prize, $3,000), produced on the Second Stage in 1989; “Soiled Eyes of a Ghost” by Erin Cressida Wilson (third prize, $2,000), not produced.